OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Action Contextualization: Adaptive Task Planning and Action Tuning using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising frontier in robotic task planning by leveraging extensive human knowledge. Nevertheless, the current literature often overlooks the critical aspects of robots' adaptability and error correction. This work aims to overcome this limitation by enabling robots to modify their motions and select the most suitable task plans based on the context. We introduce a novel framework to achieve action contextualization, aimed at tailoring robot actions to the context of specific tasks, thereby enhancing adaptability through applying LLM-derived contextual insights. Our framework integrates motion metrics that evaluate robot performances for each motion to resolve redundancy in planning. Moreover, it supports online feedback between the robot and the LLM, enabling immediate modifications to the task plans and corrections of errors. An overall success rate of 81.25% has been achieved through extensive experimental validation. Finally, when integrated with dynamical system (DS)-based robot controllers, the robotic arm-hand system demonstrates its proficiency in autonomously executing LLM-generated motion plans for sequential table-clearing tasks, rectifying errors without human intervention, and showcasing robustness against external disturbances. Our proposed framework also features the potential to be integrated with modular control approaches, significantly enhancing robots' adaptability and autonomy in performing sequential tasks in the real world.
Privacy-Preserving Debiasing using Data Augmentation and Machine Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data augmentation is widely used to mitigate data bias in the training dataset. However, data augmentation exposes machine learning models to privacy attacks, such as membership inference attacks. In this paper, we propose an effective combination of data augmentation and machine unlearning, which can reduce data bias while providing a provable defense against known attacks. Specifically, we maintain the fairness of the trained model with diffusion-based data augmentation, and then utilize multi-shard unlearning to remove identifying information of original data from the ML model for protection against privacy attacks. Experimental evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates that our approach can achieve significant improvements in bias reduction as well as robustness against state-of-the-art privacy attacks.
On the Temperature of Machine Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We develop a thermodynamic theory for machine learning (ML) systems. Similar to physical thermodynamic systems which are characterized by energy and entropy, ML systems possess these characteristics as well. This comparison inspire us to integrate the concept of temperature into ML systems grounded in the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, and establish a basic thermodynamic framework for machine learning systems with non-Boltzmann distributions. We introduce the concept of states within a ML system, identify two typical types of state, and interpret model training and refresh as a process of state phase transition. We consider that the initial potential energy of a ML system is described by the model's loss functions, and the energy adheres to the principle of minimum potential energy. For a variety of energy forms and parameter initialization methods, we derive the temperature of systems during the phase transition both analytically and asymptotically, highlighting temperature as a vital indicator of system data distribution and ML training complexity. Moreover, we perceive deep neural networks as complex heat engines with both global temperature and local temperatures in each layer. The concept of work efficiency is introduced within neural networks, which mainly depends on the neural activation functions. We then classify neural networks based on their work efficiency, and describe neural networks as two types of heat engines.
Bubble reachers and uncivil discourse in polarized online public sphere
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves. This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological homophily marked by "filter bubble" or "echo chambers." A typical response to the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers, users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.
TrialDura: Hierarchical Attention Transformer for Interpretable Clinical Trial Duration Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The clinical trial process, a critical phase in drug development, is essential for developing new treatments. The primary goal of interventional clinical trials is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of drug-based treatments for specific diseases. However, these trials are often lengthy, labor-intensive, and expensive. The duration of a clinical trial significantly impacts overall costs, making efficient timeline management crucial for controlling budgets and ensuring the economic feasibility of research. To address this issue, We propose TrialDura, a machine learning-based method that estimates the duration of clinical trials using multimodal data, including disease names, drug molecules, trial phases, and eligibility criteria. Then, we encode them into Bio-BERT embeddings specifically tuned for biomedical contexts to provide a deeper and more relevant semantic understanding of clinical trial data. Finally, the model's hierarchical attention mechanism connects all of the embeddings to capture their interactions and predict clinical trial duration. Our proposed model demonstrated superior performance with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.04 years and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.39 years compared to the other models, indicating more accurate clinical trial duration prediction. Publicly available code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrialDura-F196.
PAFedFV: Personalized and Asynchronous Federated Learning for Finger Vein Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the increasing emphasis on user privacy protection, biometric recognition based on federated learning have become the latest research hotspot. However, traditional federated learning methods cannot be directly applied to finger vein recognition, due to heterogeneity of data and open-set verification. Therefore, only a few application cases have been proposed. And these methods still have two drawbacks. (1) Uniform model results in poor performance in some clients, as the finger vein data is highly heterogeneous and non-Independently Identically Distributed (non-IID). (2) On individual client, a large amount of time is underutilized, such as the time to wait for returning model from server. To address those problems, this paper proposes a Personalized and Asynchronous Federated Learning for Finger Vein Recognition (PAFedFV) framework. PAFedFV designs personalized model aggregation method to solve the heterogeneity among non-IID data. Meanwhile, it employs an asynchronized training module for clients to utilize their waiting time. Finally, extensive experiments on six finger vein datasets are conducted. Base on these experiment results, the impact of non-IID finger vein data on performance of federated learning are analyzed, and the superiority of PAFedFV in accuracy and robustness are demonstrated.
Demystify Adult Learning: A Social Network and Large Language Model Assisted Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Adult learning is increasingly recognized as a crucial way for personal development and societal progress. It however is challenging, and adult learners face unique challenges such as balancing education with other life responsibilities. Collecting feedback from adult learners is effective in understanding their concerns and improving learning experiences, and social networks provide a rich source of real-time sentiment data from adult learners. Machine learning technologies especially large language models (LLMs) perform well in automating sentiment analysis. However, none of such models is specialized for adult learning with accurate sentiment understanding. In this paper, we present A-Learn, which enhances adult learning sentiment analysis by customizing existing general-purpose LLMs with domain-specific datasets for adult learning. We collect adult learners' comments from social networks and label the sentiment of each comment with an existing LLM to form labelled datasets tailored for adult learning. The datasets are used to customize A-Learn from several base LLMs. We conducted experimental studies and the results reveal A-Learn's competitive sentiment analysis performance, achieving up to 91.3% accuracy with 20% improvement over the base LLM. A-Learn is also employed for word cloud analysis to identify key concerns of adult learners. The research outcome of this study highlights the importance of applying machine learning with educational expertise for teaching improvement and educational innovations that benefit adult learning and adult learners.
StrideNET: Swin Transformer for Terrain Recognition with Dynamic Roughness Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The field of remote-sensing image classification has seen immense progress with the rise of convolutional neural networks, and more recently, through vision transformers. These models, with their self-attention mechanism, can effectively capture global relationships and long-range dependencies between the image patches, in contrast with traditional convolutional models. This paper introduces StrideNET, a dual-branch transformer-based model developed for terrain recognition and surface roughness extraction. The terrain recognition branch employs the Swin Transformer to classify varied terrains by leveraging its capability to capture both local and global features. Complementing this, the roughness extraction branch utilizes a statistical texture-feature analysis technique to dynamically extract important land surface properties such as roughness and slipperiness. The model was trained on a custom dataset consisting of four terrain classes - grassy, marshy, sandy, and rocky, and it outperforms benchmark CNN and transformer based models, by achieving an average test accuracy of over 99 % across all classes. The applications of this work extend to different domains such as environmental monitoring, land use and cover classification, disaster response and precision agriculture.
Detecting Build Dependency Errors in Incremental Builds
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Incremental and parallel builds performed by build tools such as Make are the heart of modern C/C++ software projects. Their correct and efficient execution depends on build scripts. However, build scripts are prone to errors. The most prevalent errors are missing dependencies (MDs) and redundant dependencies (RDs). The state-of-the-art methods for detecting these errors rely on clean builds (i.e., full builds of a subset of software configurations in a clean environment), which is costly and takes up to multiple hours for large-scale projects. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called EChecker to detect build dependency errors in the context of incremental builds. The core idea of EChecker is to automatically update actual build dependencies by inferring them from C/C++ pre-processor directives and Makefile changes from new commits, which avoids clean builds when possible. EChecker achieves higher efficiency than the methods that rely on clean builds while maintaining effectiveness. We selected 12 representative projects, with their sizes ranging from small to large, with 240 commits (20 commits for each project), based on which we evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of EChecker. We compared the evaluation results with a state-of-the-art build dependency error detection tool. The evaluation shows that the F-1 score of EChecker improved by 0.18 over the state-of-the-art method. EChecker increases the build dependency error detection efficiency by an average of 85.14 times (with the median at 16.30 times). The results demonstrate that EChecker can support practitioners in detecting build dependency errors efficiently.
MARec: Metadata Alignment for cold-start Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

For many recommender systems, the primary data source is a historical record of user clicks. The associated click matrix is often very sparse, as the number of users x products can be far larger than the number of clicks. Such sparsity is accentuated in cold-start settings, which makes the efficient use of metadata information of paramount importance. In this work, we propose a simple approach to address cold-start recommendations by leveraging content metadata, Metadata Alignment for cold-start Recommendation. We show that this approach can readily augment existing matrix factorization and autoencoder approaches, enabling a smooth transition to top performing algorithms in warmer set-ups. Our experimental results indicate three separate contributions: first, we show that our proposed framework largely beats SOTA results on 4 cold-start datasets with different sparsity and scale characteristics, with gains ranging from +8.4% to +53.8% on reported ranking metrics; second, we provide an ablation study on the utility of semantic features, and proves the additional gain obtained by leveraging such features ranges between +46.8% and +105.5%; and third, our approach is by construction highly competitive in warm set-ups, and we propose a closed-form solution outperformed by SOTA results by only 0.8% on average.
Non-Linear Paging
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We formulate and study non-linear paging - a broad model of online paging where the size of subsets of pages is determined by a monotone non-linear set function of the pages. This model captures the well-studied classic weighted paging and generalized paging problems, and also submodular and supermodular paging, studied here for the first time, that have a range of applications from virtual memory to machine learning. Unlike classic paging, the cache threshold parameter $k$ does not yield good competitive ratios for non-linear paging. Instead, we introduce a novel parameter $\ell$ that generalizes the notion of cache size to the non-linear setting. We obtain a tight deterministic $\ell$-competitive algorithm for general non-linear paging and a $o\left(\log^2 (\ell)\right)$-competitive lower bound for randomized algorithms. Our algorithm is based on a new generic LP for the problem that captures both submodular and supermodular paging, in contrast to LPs used for submodular cover settings. We finally focus on the supermodular paging problem, which is a variant of online set cover and online submodular cover, where sets are repeatedly requested to be removed from the cover. We obtain polylogarithmic lower and upper bounds and an offline approximation algorithm.
Fuzzychain: An Equitable Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake (PoS) is popular yet has its drawbacks, notably the potential for centralising power in nodes with larger stakes or higher rewards. Fuzzychain, our proposed solution, introduces the use of fuzzy sets to define stake semantics, promoting decentralised and distributed processing control. This system selects validators based on their degree of membership to the stake fuzzy sets rather than just the size of their stakes. As a pioneer proposal in applying fuzzy sets to blockchain, Fuzzychain aims to rectify PoS's limitations. Our results indicate that Fuzzychain not only matches PoS in functionality but also ensures a fairer distribution of stakes among validators, leading to more inclusive validator selection and a better-distributed network.
Music Consistency Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Consistency models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in facilitating efficient image/video generation, enabling synthesis with minimal sampling steps. It has proven to be advantageous in mitigating the computational burdens associated with diffusion models. Nevertheless, the application of consistency models in music generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present Music Consistency Models (\texttt{MusicCM}), which leverages the concept of consistency models to efficiently synthesize mel-spectrogram for music clips, maintaining high quality while minimizing the number of sampling steps. Building upon existing text-to-music diffusion models, the \texttt{MusicCM} model incorporates consistency distillation and adversarial discriminator training. Moreover, we find it beneficial to generate extended coherent music by incorporating multiple diffusion processes with shared constraints. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of our model in terms of computational efficiency, fidelity, and naturalness. Notable, \texttt{MusicCM} achieves seamless music synthesis with a mere four sampling steps, e.g., only one second per minute of the music clip, showcasing the potential for real-time application.
Movie101v2: Improved Movie Narration Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic movie narration aims to generate video-aligned plot descriptions to assist visually impaired audiences. Unlike standard video captioning, it involves not only describing key visual details but also inferring plots that unfold across multiple movie shots, presenting distinct and complex challenges. To advance this field, we introduce Movie101v2, a large-scale, bilingual dataset with enhanced data quality specifically designed for movie narration. Revisiting the task, we propose breaking down the ultimate goal of automatic movie narration into three progressive stages, offering a clear roadmap with corresponding evaluation metrics. Based on our new benchmark, we baseline a range of large vision-language models, including GPT-4V, and conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenges in narration generation. Our findings highlight that achieving applicable movie narration generation is a fascinating goal that requires significant research.
Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Communications Using Uplink-Downlink Duality
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel optimization framework for beamforming design in integrated sensing and communication systems where a base station seeks to minimize the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound of a sensing problem while satisfying quality of service constraints for the communication users. Prior approaches formulate the design problem as a semidefinite program for which acquiring a beamforming solution is computationally expensive. In this work, we show that the computational burden can be considerably alleviated. To achieve this, we transform the design problem to a tractable form that not only provides a new understanding of Cramér-Rao bound optimization, but also allows for an uplink-downlink duality relation to be developed. Such a duality result gives rise to an efficient algorithm that enables the beamforming design problem to be solved at a much lower complexity as compared to the-state-of-the-art methods.
Intrusion Detection at Scale with the Assistance of a Command-line Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Intrusion detection is a long standing and crucial problem in security. A system capable of detecting intrusions automatically is on great demand in enterprise security solutions. Existing solutions rely heavily on hand-crafted rules designed by security operators, which suffer from high false negative rates and poor generalization ability to new, zero-day attacks at scale. AI and machine learning offer promising solutions to address the issues, by inspecting abnormal user behaviors intelligently and automatically from data. However, existing learning-based intrusion detection systems in the literature are mostly designed for small data, and they lack the ability to leverage the power of big data in cloud environments. In this paper, we target at this problem and introduce an intrusion detection system which incorporates large-scale pre-training, so as to train a large language model based on tens of millions of command lines for AI-based intrusion detection. Experiments performed on 30 million training samples and 10 million test samples verify the effectiveness of our solution.
"I Wish There Were an AI": Challenges and AI Potential in Cancer Patient-Provider Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Patient-provider communication has been crucial to cancer patients' survival after their cancer treatments. However, the research community and patients themselves often overlook the communication challenges after cancer treatments as they are overshadowed by the severity of the patient's illness and the variety and rarity of the cancer disease itself. Meanwhile, the recent technical advances in AI, especially in Large Language Models (LLMs) with versatile natural language interpretation and generation ability, demonstrate great potential to support communication in complex real-world medical situations. By interviewing six healthcare providers and eight cancer patients, our goal is to explore the providers' and patients' communication barriers in the post-cancer treatment recovery period, their expectations for future communication technologies, and the potential of AI technologies in this context. Our findings reveal several challenges in current patient-provider communication, including the knowledge and timing gaps between cancer patients and providers, their collaboration obstacles, and resource limitations. Moreover, based on providers' and patients' needs and expectations, we summarize a set of design implications for intelligent communication systems, especially with the power of LLMs. Our work sheds light on the design of future AI-powered systems for patient-provider communication under high-stake and high-uncertainty situations.